The Spanish Civil War

Julian Casanova

Cazanova is a Profess or Contemporary History at the University
of Zaragoza in Spain. He has lectured at a number of European, Latin American
and North American universities. His research work spans anarchism, the history
of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Civil War.

Omar Salim Al Tell

Al Tell is a Jordanian
translator and researcher who has translated a number of academic works into
Arabic. He is the author of a book on the Sufi tariqas of tenth-century
Baghdad.

PublishingPageContent

The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies published an
Arabic translation of A Short History
of the Spanish Civil War (304 pp.), by Spanish historian Julian Casanova,
in November, 2017 (an English version was published by IB Tauris in 2012). The
book, translated by Omar Al-Tell, offers Arabic language readers to a pivotal
period in inter-war Europe. Beyond that, the history of the conflict narrated
in the book is inseparably linked to the history of Morocco, the home to many
of the soldiers who fought on Spanish battlefields.

Why War?

Casanova's
Introduction seeks to answer why the Spanish Civil War became an inevitability.
In it, the author argues that the country’s Guerra Civil was the result
of the failure of the junta which toppled Spain’s elected government to impose
law and order and to fundamentally the republican form of government. The junta
leaders’ desire to overturn the nascent “Second Republic” was not shared
uniformly by all sectors of the army. Consequently, regimented, armed formations
found themselves supporting opposing political aims.

Following his introduction,
Casanova gives readers of the book a chronology of the hostilities to grip
Spain throughout the 1930s: from the electoral victory of the Republicans in 1931,
to the conclusion of hostilities and the consolidation of the Franco regime in
1939. The book gives an overview of how the Spanish Civil War played out across
all of the Spanish territories, from Catalonia, Castile and Aragon to the
Canary Islands and the Basque Country. The geographic diversity of the country,
claims Casanova, is what gave rise to what the author called “the Two Spains”:
the junta found support in Castile and Leon as well as in the northwestern tip
of Iberia, in Galicia and in the towns of Andalusia and the Canary Islands. The
Republicans, meanwhile, held on to strongholds in the main industrialized and
urban centers of Spain, including Catalonian and Asturian cities. One crucial
fact underscored by Cazanova’s book is the economic might of the Republican
side during the early stages of the conflict, as banks did not side with the
junta at first, and the republicans even held on to control to Spain’s gold
reserves.

Later, the book
explores the involvement of the Catholic clergy in what would become a “crusade”
for Spain’s soul, between devout pro-Franco soldiers and a godless and largely
communist anti-junta faction. By the time that this conflict was decided in
favor of the pro-Franco faction, Spain was reaping the whirlwind of fascism
rolling through Europe. The conclusion of Casanova's book is given over to
showing how a Francoist regime survived even the downfall of other fascist
regimes elsewhere in the continent, before it voluntarily unraveled itself and
paved the way for electoral democracy once the junta’s leading general had
died.

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